I have been on a 2 year odyssey to get my financial life in order. Mostly I've failed. I started by reading lots of books which generally said "do this" but never explained why. Over the next few weeks/months I'm going to try and summarize what I've learned.
Month: July 2003
Yaron's Rules of Standardization
Most of my job for the last few years has been working on standards. In that time I noticed a fairly obvious pattern for technologies that tend to make successful standards, they meet three criteria:
Yaron's rules of standardization:
- The technology must be very old and very well understood
- 20 years is a good rule of thumb
- Everyone must implement the technologies in essentially the same way
- A good rule of thumb is, how hard would it be to build a bi-directional proxy between the various players implementation of the technology?
- Standardizing the technology must provide greater advantage to the software writing community then keeping the technology incompatible
- Even in the open source world standards can fail if there isn't enough advantage in it, just look at the fights over RSS.
Darik's Boot and Nuke & Mandrake 9.1
I have an old computer I finally want to get rid of and I need to destroy all the data on the drives before sending it to be recycled. There is a simple GPL solution called Darik's Boot and Nuke which does the trick. But the directions on the Website don't quite work for Mandrake 9.1. Here were the changes I had to make:
To copy the image to a floppy I had to use dd if=dban-*.img of=/dev/fd0. [1] I had trouble with /dev/random generating enough bits. The easiest workaround is to substitute /dev/urandom for /dev/random. But there is a more paranoid choice. [2]
[1] In most system apparently /dev/floppy points to the floppy device but in Mandrake 9.1 it points to a directory with the floppy's contents. /dev/fd0 is what Mandrake uses to point at the actual floppy image, it's a link to /dev/floppy/0.
[2] /dev/urandom uses a crypto grade hash to extend the amount of random data collected by /dev/random. This should be fine but I'm really paranoid so instead what I do is first run dd if=/dev/random of=MySeedFile bs=512 count=20. This will give me more than the 512 bytes required by DBAN. You will have to play with the mouse a bit to generate enough random data to fill the request. Once the dd returns then I execute dd if=MySeedFile of=MySeedFile2 bs=512 count=1 and then delete MySeedFile.
2004 Democratic Presidential Candidate Howard Dean
There has been a lot of excitement in the American Internet community about Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean because he knows how to use a blog, raise money on-line and maybe not necessarily heap more disgrace upon America. So I decided to check out Howard Dean's website and his stand on the issues.
The high level summary is that he is a tax and spend liberal whose solution to most problems is to throw money at it. He doesn't have any new ideas, few concrete plans and no apparent clue for how we will fund the money he wants to lob around other than getting rid of Bush's tax cuts. While I may identify with large parts of Dean's social agenda fundamentally Dean believes government is the solution, not the problem.
Continue reading 2004 Democratic Presidential Candidate Howard
Dean